“Ah, you were one of my little ones,” smiles Joy Whitby, knowingly. The Telegraph photographer’s eyes have just lit up as he spots a Play School cover in the pile of archive books in her Notting Hill flat.

Now 82, but seeming much younger, Whitby has a twinkly expression, soft grey curls, and a gentle voice, just right for the woman who’s spent her entire adult life telling children stories. She launched Play School and Jackanory at the BBC Children’s Unit in the mid 1960s, before going on to run children’s programmes at the ITV franchises, London Weekend Television and Yorkshire, making such cult gems as Catweazle – about an out-of-time Saxon wizard befuddled by the “electrickery” of the 1970s. She was the first TV producer to win the Eleanor Farjeon award for contributions to children’s literature and ran the European Broadcasting Union’s Children’s Drama Exchange in the 1980s.

Still making programmes – she’s currently negotiating the bureaucracy to complete funding for an animated Mouse and Mole Christmas special for the BBC, featuring Alan Bennett, Richard Briers and Imelda Staunton. And reveals herself to be a dab hand with online technology, as she puts together archive clips for a forthcoming screening and interview at the British Film Institute.

Whitby’s career began in the rather unlikely sounding environs of a psychiatric practice called the Mayfair Delinquency Clinic (“I can remember one very distressed nymphomaniac”), where in 1954, as a newly married Oxford history graduate, she had taken a secretarial job with an idea, “like so many middle-class girls”, of becoming a social worker.

“I used to tell stories to the very young children of patients, while they were waiting. The other secretaries thought I was uppity and as a joke showed me an advert in the paper for a position on Listen with Mother.”

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Whitby eventually got a job as a station manager at BBC radio. The year she spent working with the creative possibilities of sound effects proved central to her TV career, though she recalls getting so distressed during a POW drama that they had to find a male technician to crack the whip instead. She later joined the Children’s department, where she wrote a report about refreshing the Watch With Mother slot that saw her appointed producer on Play School for the new BBC TWO channel in 1964. Her husband, Tony Whitby had joined the BBC after her and eventually became controller of Radio 4. He died in 1975.

Unlike most of the female producers in the Children’s unit at the time, she was married with three young children and says she wanted to get rid of the patronising tone of Watch With Mother.

Her innovation with bold graphics and short “advert”-style films seen through the different windows influenced American producers, who came to meet her while developing a new-planned show called Sesame Street.

Whitby’s discovery, Brian Cant, who famously improvised in a cardboard box at his Play School audition, remains the timelessly affable template for preschool children’s presenting. Right from the start, Play School had both gender and ethnically diverse casting with Paul Danquah, Phyllida Law and Marla Landi.

Whitby put the writing talents of Eric Thompson, another early Play School presenter, together with the strange French animation The Magic Roundabout. Catweazle developed out of a one-page proposal Whitby received from an unknown Richard Carpenter, who went on to write many popular dramas, including Robin of Sherwood. And in the early 1980s she spotted a raven-haired, intense-looking schoolgirl, who was hanging around while her boyfriend auditioned – and cast her as a scheming Victorian minx in the supernatural BBC drama A Pattern of Roses. She was Helena Bonham Carter.

“The unions wouldn’t let me have two non-Equity actors,” recalls Whitby who was forced to choose between her and the equally unknown Hugh Grant.

It wasn’t just the shop stewards causing difficulties. Whitby once found a male producer rummaging through her desk at Yorkshire TV, where she was controller of Children’s Programmes. “Quite a lot of the talented men working on children’s programmes [at the BBC] were gay, so there wasn’t much sexual harassment around... At YTV, though, I did feel that several of the men around the table were more comfortable pinching secretaries’ bottoms than dealing on equal terms with females.”

Though not bitter, Whitby does feel she’s been “marginalised” in some histories of children’s television, notably in The Box of Delights, by Anna Home, who became head of BBC Children’s Programmes after she left. “The ranks close when you leave, and the doors shut. I think looking back some of them were envious of my early success and glad to get rid of me.”

Evidence of the rather vindictive BBC politics of the time lies, bizarrely, in the 6th Blue Peter annual. It features a horse-racing story about a villainous jockey called “Whitby Stephens”, apparently a reference to Joy and her boss, Doreen Stevens, who’d both left to join the new LWT franchise in 1968.

Intriguingly Whitby also remembers the late Verity Lambert, BBC TV’s now revered first female drama producer, ringing her up, after leaving Doctor Who: “Play School had just begun and she rang out of the blue to ask if I could take her on. We hadn’t met but I felt she was too high-powered and always regretted not getting to know her.”

While the BBC may be gearing up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who this year, the broadcaster recently joined ITV in confining all children’s programming to its dedicated channels – Cbeebies and CBBC. The Teletubbies’ creator Anne Wood (who originally trained under Whitby) has publicly condemned the decision as “ghettoising” children’s content. But Whitby is not sentimental about change.

“I’m with Joe Godwin [the current head of BBC Children’s] on this,” she says, citing the huge range of entertainment options open to children in the internet age. “We have to move with the times. We’ve always known that a lot of adults eavesdrop on children’s programmes... It might bother them to have to switch to an unfamiliar channel to find Blue Peter but that isn’t the point.”

What does bother Whitby is perhaps symptomatic of broader “toxic” changes in very small children’s increasingly passive lives. “I worry about the glutting amount for children from early morning six till six... If I had a child under five at home again, I wouldn’t want to leave him in front of the television set unsupervised if I could possibly help it.”

Whitby acknowledges her privileged background – she was always able to afford a full-time nanny – but feels the discussion about class and children’s TV has often been hypocritical. “I always thought it funny that the very middle-class producers in BBC Children’s were quick to adopt the new approach epitomised by calling children 'kids’ – a far cry from Children’s Hour.” Her pitch for the 1970 fantasy adventure Grasshopper Island was rejected by the BBC as “too middle class” and taken up by LWT instead.

But Whitby is scathing of the “zoo” and prank formats of the 70s such as Tiswas, which she thinks were “dominated by monsters like Chris Tarrant... as a stepping stone to a wider public” and eventually to the excesses of reality TV shows such as I’m a Celebrity.

“I realise I’ve always been an elitist, so those audience-pulling shows were not my scene, and I only watched occasionally out of duty, not pleasure. Toffee-nosed! Knocking established values came across as daring and innovative... but I think there is a connection between the old protective, uncommercial approach to children’s programming, and marketing pressures that are such a big hidden influence today.”

Whitby now manages her Grasshopper Productions website. She has re-edited many of her old shows (taking out what have become unacceptable references to such outrageous ideas as under-10s walking to the shops on their own) and finds that the long tail model of marketing has brought many of her now 40- and 50-something “little ones” back to buy them on DVD.

Now that even her own grandchildren are in their twenties, Whitby says she doesn’t watch children’s programmes any more, but singles out the multi-award winning BBC series, Horrible Histories, for praise.

Once the BFI event is over, her attention will be back on completing Mouse and Mole. “I am a tomorrow and not a yesterday person,” she says. “Perhaps that’s why I’m still working.”

Joy Whitby: Telling Stories on the Telly and Joy Whitby in Conversation with Samira Ahmed take place on Saturday 2 February at BFI Southbank; www.bfi.org.uk